A Miracle by Definition

"wherein it can be shown under the introduction of prayer to the deity of your choice that the resulting data from the two locations changes from the expected result by a factor that can only be the result of said prayer."said sidelined.rather i would view this as evidence of something akin to telekenisis, not excluding devine involvement but providing no evidence for devine involvement either. it would infact give credence to the idea that perhaps all miracles could be rooted in such hypothetical human meta-mentation (read ~telekenisis), as it is likely that enstiens theory of a 4 dimensional space time universe is correct.any action of prayer is by action at a distance, not direct physical involvement. anything that can effect at a distance without physical involvement can also travel though time, as space and time are one and the same.then, why not miracles being "caused" (more "entangled" since causality has now gone a bit out the window) by the prayers and beliefs of believers in the future? i.e. jesus could walk on water because the combined mental force of everyone who ever did or ever will believe that he did increased the surface tension of said water to to a point where someone could walk on it.in such a view would not the "seed" (if you will) of such a happening be the holy text, not the believers or jesus."in the beginning there was the word ... and the word was god"p.s. i'm not exactly what most people would call a christian, but john seems preaty apt sometimes.Edited by meese, : attributed quote to the wrong person...

all macroscopic events are of vanishing probability. take for example a snowflake. it is generally accepted (except by some researchers from denver who claim they found tow identicals) that every snowflake is unique. therefor every snowflake, taken individually, is extreamly unlikely to have it's specific form as compared to all other snowflakes that every existed. am i then shoveling miracles in the morning? (some would say yes)i propose that a miracle needs to be written down, as per my reply to sideline. i.e. caused by the word of god so to speak.though i think the word is god, and not just in any given holy text

dude, i'm not sure where you read any "anger" in my post, i like snow and think it is pretty cool. if i was a psycologist i might say something about projection, but i am not qualified.my point was all things are "extraordinary events", except possibly blackbody radiation. snow is enourmously simple, regular hexagonal crystals of molocules consisting of 3 atoms each, and yet can contain such complexity. taken beside something so mundane, yet of vast consiquence to humanity, as snow, compare the human immune system. compare vaccinations...(where do new ideas come from anyway?)if god has had any involvment with the universe at all (let alone total involvement), would not nearly anything satisfy the conditions of being extrodinary and of the result of devine intervention?so why would i say such inflamitory and injurious things? to lay a foundation to my reponse to the question of what constitues a miracle, the topic at hand, no? sorry if it offends you, but i like having atleast a misty or meandering trail of something akin to logic when considering any given question.my premis: all things are fantastical, and can be atributed to god if such is to your liking.my conclusion: either all things are miracles, or what constitutes a miracle must be something other than the inherent wierdness of the universe.and as such i put forth the supposition, ripe for critical examination, that miracles could be defined by their realtion to written documents.i whole heartedly encourage you to point out errancies in this admitadly less than rigorous argument, such that the frontier of knowlage and understand may be expanded.

i stick to my position that (nearly) all things are fantasical, the letter A especially. i support this position by suggesting a deffinition of fantastical by reffering back to the orginal post and it's deffinition of miracle, "an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs". lets ignore the devine part and say that fantastical="an extrodinary event", and that other synonyms of this same general concept are acceptable.so what is extraordinary? outside or beyond of the oridinary form our good friends the latins. lets say that ordinary and comprehensible are about the same thing.i guess i may have gone to far in saying "all" things are fantasticle, (but in my defence all the parenthesis get a bit tireing. i will strive to be more rigourous.) clearly some things can be understood,(which in itself is arguable, what if we are really and actually a bunch of cartesian brains in jars, being fed a perfect artificial reality, thus only being able to know that we think and there for are ) such as very simple physical happenings, generalized systems, and math.

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a very simple physical happening: if you have a perfectly inert, very samll jar, with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen, you will eventually get one water molocule, plus some photons. why and how can get comlicated, but it is still withing the realm of understanding.

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a generalized system: if you have a whole mess of water vapour in the frozen alberta sky, you get snow. this is common sense, and although hard to explain explicitly, generally infallible.

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math is a priori (say some), it just kind of exists for us to discover. when we discovered enough of it we could explain and understand snow and a frozen lake and right down to the phase changes of water and even a single molocule of water. things get pretty wierd when they get that small, but as you pointed out, given enough time some stuff just becomes a sure thing. (unless of course one of your atoms sponateously collapses into a pile of quarks, but we got the math for that too)

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a conceed the point that snow, in its general "hey look it's snowing" sense is not extraordinary, because it is general and we can understand it in both the common sense and statistical mathmatical kind of way. BUT, any given snowFlake and its specific shape is way beyond our ability to understand commone sense like (who here has an intuitive knowlage of atoms and molocules dancing about by the billions) and our mathmatics. and don't think there haven't been hundreds of undergrad and thesis papers that really gave it a try).

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i gave the example of a snowFlake just for that reason, and sorry if i was not clear enough in distinguishing from one flake and all snow that every was or will be. if you still disagree and insist that a snowflake is ordinary, perhaps you could deffine ordinary (and thus extraordinary) or maybe it just isn't worth the bother.

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now before i explain way i think the letter A is deffinately way out there, i'd like to adress your concern with my suggestion that miracles are related to written documents. i turn you attention to my first two posts. i highlight the i (although perhap ambigously) did say that any old document will do. that is a bit secondary so we can just concentrate on the bible, which is where i got my example from in my first message. go back and read it, not the one you responded to first, but my reply to sidelined. did you read it? good. ask questions, point out problems... the whole telekenisis thing is pretty unfounded i agree, but as we are talking about miracles lets call it "faith".

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now why is A so special? A is rather similar to math, in that it has an existence outside and beyond any one instance of the letter A, what one could call an archetype (not unlike you master snowflake). but unlike math we invented it rather than discovered it inhernet in the universe. in a general sense, maybe archetypes could be call ordinary as they facilitate our understanding as animals exploring our enviroment. nothing is comprehensible without an archetype (even if we don't realize we are using it), and i would suggest that is what socrates ment when he said we remembered things rather than learned them. it is streching common sense to say that archetypes are comprehenisble, but one could say we clearly understand things in novel situations (i.e. though every snowflake is unique, we all know what snow is).

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but we Created A. not just in a "i'll smash this rock until it is sharp and hunt moose with it" way, but gave it it's specific and magical form out of a big pile of nothing. maybe not quite nothing if you really press the point because it does represent a sound, but then where did they idea of symbolism come from?

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apparently it is inherent, as we do have archetypes and can also teach chimps sign language (or can tell a dog to sit). but do we understand that? no way, not even in the most elastic sense of the common.

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so even if three lines put together just so means something related to our vast and complex evolution, we could one day understand it. i would say at this point a letter is deffinately extraordinary, but will ceed the point that maybe, one day... but then the letter A is much more than just a sound written down. it symbolizes much more, primacy, sucess, beginnings, even all the stuff that has an A in it is deeply intertwined in the magic of the letter A.

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and since this is about miracles, and jesus is already in the mix, lets take the phrase "the alpha and the omega". have you seen a greek A(alpha)? it looks just like a fish. so the letter a is not only a letter, an important letter, it is also a mystic symbol. jesus is the alpha and the omega, the beggining and the end (and in a clearly stated relation to the ALPHAbet, and thus writing).

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that is a part of why A is deffinately extraordianry. a much better example of something that seams simple until you examine it, i thank you.

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now as for miracles, i again point you to my foofy primary post about telepathy, as it explains my view of how documents are an essential part of miracles. as it is pretty foofy, i am willing to accept miracle after miracle in my everyday life because i am at a loss to see any way around it, and hold the telekenisis in reserve for when i want to pretend i know what is going on. i do believe in god (though many would call me an athiest) and i do accept the existence of jesus (though i reserve the right to see him as possibly a transdimentional though-being and not necciarily walk the land and the lakes in the "it happened exactly as it was written" way). as such i see your conventional miracles as more than parlor tricks we will soon be able to pull off in the back yard (and by the way, i have no problem walking on the water in my back yard) and more as sign posts to remind us of the every day miracles that some would have us ignore.

after a bit of a think about what i said to jon, i have decided i have something more to say about how to define a miracle.to me a miracle is something you read about that tells you something about god. the examples you provied are not miracles unless to someone they say, unambiguously and deffinately, that god wanted person A to have a lot of money and person B to not die of cancer. some people may be able to read that, but not me, so they are not miracles to me.jesus walking on water said to a lot fo people something along the lines of "god is all powerful", which was something useful to some people maybe. But Not to (most) Christians, because they already believed god was all powerful, and thus could not be taught that idea.i, on the other hand, did learn something, eventually, from that report. some christians did too, no doubt, but i imagine it was something personal and hard to explain and went beyond the raw power of thier god. what i learned is also hard to explain, (though i try sometimes) but in the end easy to learn because i grew up believing that if you thought jesus walked on water you might as well have ground beef where your brain should be.miracles are for the non-believers. you can't define a miracle in the dictionary because we all believe something different. i would also say you can never see a miracle because they need to be relayed evangelically. those who see what others call a miracle have had a direct experience of the devine, which goes beyond a simlpe miracle.that said, miracles and devine contact aren't limited to the bible and prophets.